What Are The Gobshites Saying These Days?

Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which is, as you know, what Paganini would have come up with had he composed Sonatina e Poladancer.

Oh, they're singing from the same hymnal now, boyos. Over the weekend, besides trying their damndest to hoist Big Chicken back onto his own bandwagon -- Insert Fork Lift joke Here -- it seems that the gobshites have all come to the basic agreement that Edward Snowden is more than half Boris Badenov, and that all good liberals should be wary of supporting him because, as Sean Wilentz put it in The New Republic,Surveillance and secrecy will never be attractive features of a democratic government, but they are not inimical to it, either. Because having liberals accept that principle as axiomatic in the past has done so very much good for us as a nation. Anyway, it came as something of a revelation to me that the general chorus became so deafening this weekend. They have decided on a narrative, they have, and they're sticking to it. As veteran newsman Les Nessman once put it about a flock of turkeys -- it's almost as though they were...organized.

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Here, for example, is the increasingly useless Diane Feinstein, visiting with the Dancin' Master, and dishing out some ironclad speculation about Comrade Snowden.

GREGORY: And do you agree with Chairman Rogers that he may have had help from the Russians?

FEINSTEIN: He may well have. We don't know at this stage. But I think to glorify this act is really to set sort of a new level of dishonor. And this goes to where this metadata goes. Because the N.S.A. are professionals. They are limited in number to 22 who have access to the data. Two of them are supervisors. They are vetted. They are carefully supervised. The data goes anywhere else. How do you provide that level of supervision?

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Yes, m'lady, We don't know at this stage, but it may have happened. (It really is time for you to go give a speech in Wheeling, isn't it?) And, will o'god, as my old Irish grandmother used to say, the people with access to the data are so very carefully supervised that a second-level contractor -- who, I will bet something substantial, was not one of the 22 Initiates -- got in there, took everything except Keith Alexander's shorts, and got all the way to Moscow with his stash. There is losing the plot, and then there is leaving the plot out in the middle of the yard for the squirrels to pick at. She could be joined in West Virginia by Congressman Mike Rogers, a former Feeb who has made himself into quite the nuisance. Rogers has gotten very good at the old fact-free boogedy-boogedy his own self.

GREGORY: But how high level, do you think?

ROGERS: Well, let me just say this. I believe there's a reason he ended up in the hands, the loving arms, of an FSB agent in Moscow. I don't think that's a coincidence, number one. Number two, and let me just talk about this. I think it's important.

DAVID GREGORY: You think the Russians helped Ed Snowden?

REPRESENTATIVE MIKE ROGERS: I believe there's questions to be answered there. I don't think it was a gee-whiz luck event that he ended up in Moscow under the handling of the FSB.

GREGORY: That's a significant development if it's true.

REPRESENTATIVE MIKE ROGERS: Well, I said we have questions we have to answer. But as somebody who used to do investigations, some of the things we're finding we would call clues that certainly would indicate to me that he had some help and he stole things that had nothing to do with privacy. And just real quickly, though.

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If you are detecting the unmistakable aroma of congressional chickenshit, you are not alone.

But, to be fair, Feinstein had a lot of company everywhere. Over on This Week WithThe Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs, a congresscritter named Mike McCaul bid fair to make DiFi sound like John Henry Faulk.

MCCAUL: Hey, listen, I don't think Snowden -- Mr. Snowden woke up one day and had the wherewithal to do this all by himself. I think he was helped by others.

STEPHANOPOULOS: The Russians?

MCCAUL: You know, to say definitively, I can't -- I can't answer that. But I personally believe that he was cultivated by a foreign power to do what he did. And he -- I would submit, again, that he's not a hero by any stretch. He's a traitor. He -- he lives not very far down the street from where I am right now, enjoying probably less freedoms today here in Russia than he had in the United States of America.

The Clinton Guy was taken briefly aback, possibly because he was momentarily distracted by the fact that some establishment Texas hack who shares a congressional delegation with Louie Gohmert had taken it upon himself to rewrite the constitutional definition of treason. He pressed on.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That's a pretty serious charge, sir. Which foreign power do you believe cultivated Edward Snowden?

MCCAUL: Again, I can't give a definitive statement on that. I -- but I've been given all the evidence, I know Mike Rogers has access to, you know, that I've seen that I don't think he was acting alone.

I often tell the story of my friend from Belfast who, on his way to the Boston Garden one night to sing the National Anthem at a Celtics game, was confronted by a man who jumped out of an alley and said, "Give me your wallet. I have a gun."

"Sir," replied my friend, "where I come from, if you have a gun, you produce it," and he kept on walking.

This, to DiFi, and to Rogers, and to McCaul, and to Rogers. If you have the gun, produce it.

But the comic relief came when everyone decided it was time to get Chris Christie out of the ditch. The Dancin' Master pulled out one of the hoary tropes that Elliott Abrams used to use when people seemed disturbed that Saint Ronnie sold missiles to the mullahs and then used the money raised thereby to support nun-rapers and bishop-killers in Central America -- that we are "criminalizing politics."

GREGORY: Here's what I really want to know.

WISNIEWSKI: Sure.

GREGORY: Is Chris Christie a bully who abused power? Or are you seeking to criminalize the rough and tumble of New Jersey politics?

Oh, for the love of the fk, that's what you really want to know? Isn't the bully part pretty much a closed question at this point? The problem is not that we are criminalizing politics, it's that the Big Chicken crew may have politicized criminality. Please see, "Mitchell, John" for further information.

There was more water being hauled over on ABC, where the Powerhouse Panel -- a name ABC stole from the monthly lunch meeting of the Future Poulterers Association of Rock Island -- was enlivened by Our Lady Of The Magic Dolphins, who strung the conjuring words together until everybody else saw lovely pink unicorns cavorting out of her ears.

NOONAN: But I think you can say in fairness that the New York based media, which has certain political predilections or sympathies is pounding this guy everyday in a way, deserved or not, in a way that they did not apply to IRS, the Benghazi, this one, that one. It's true. That was not frontpage every day.

Please, luv, explain to me what the IRS is, or "the" Benghazi. I am utterly unaware of these two events. I have seen no coverage of them at all.

Finally, over on CBS, former Alice Of Champagne prom date Bob Schieffer hosted the ubiquitous Mike Rogers, who once again asked for my wallet without producing the gun.

ROGERS: Well, sure, there's a couple of things that we worry about. One is there were some, at least some events and some small reflections on everything from how he prepared to leave, his route of departure, his -- and how he quickly ended up in Moscow. All of those things raise questions. And there's -- some of that's still under investigation. But there's some clear evidence there that something else was going on. This wasn't a random, smash-and-grab, run down the road, end up in China, the bastion of Internet freedom, and then Russia, of course, the bastion of Internet freedom. Something more was going on there.